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On Spoken French: An Ashby Reader
William J. Ashby
[Studies in Language Companion Series 226] 2023
► pp. 371–388

Preferred Argument Structure in spoken French and Spanish

| University of California, Santa Barbara
| Universidad de Caracas
This article uses the quantitative methodology of GoldVarb to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and a corpus of spoken Spanish. It is shown that this distribution is not random, but instead conforms to a grammatically and pragmatically motivated pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure.
Article outline
  • 1.Methodology
  • 2.Results
    • 2.1The grammatical dimensions of PAS
    • 2.2The non-lexical A constraint
    • 2.3The one lexical argument constraint
    • 2.4The pragmatic dimensions of PAS
      • 2.4.1Generalizability
      • 2.4.2Animacy
    • 2.5The given A constraint
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.226.c27
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